darkoshi | Entries tagged with books

Success: Both dogs have been microchipped.
Fail: Serena's new "break-away" collar didn't even last 2 days on her. I found it chewed up into little pieces in the yard. I'll need to make her a metal chain collar like Zorro's, with an elastic strip for safety. Unless Zorro takes to pulling that off her too, in which case I guess she can't have a safety collar.

I attended, with Qiao, the funeral of one of his family friends. They are Episcopalian. Qiao kneels and prays in church. It seems bizarre to me how I can be in a relationship with someone so different from me. The first time the congregation was asked to kneel, I stayed sitting. The 2nd time, I thought that it might feel good to stretch my back, so I kneeled too. Boy was I wrong; kneeling in the pews was not at all comfortable for my back. Had I not been able to lean my arms over the edge of the pew, I might not have been able to maintain that position.

I'm using my new kneeling chair; I'm quite pleased with it. Nevertheless, my back is still very achy. It is still possible to slouch in this chair, so I'm not sure whether it will help much.

I wish I knew the cause of my back aches. I feel like I have to wait until the pain eventually becomes excruciating, before I can seek medical diagnostics and treatment. After all, the chiropractor already performed x-rays and said that my spine looked fine. So whatever is wrong must not be wrong enough yet to be detectable.

It seems that I made the crotch a bit too short on the pair of jeans which I altered. The pants are wearable, but it was a disappointing result after having put all that effort into it.

I read some more of the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" book yesterday. It's interesting, and it makes me want to know the answer to the mysteries, but there's nothing to the story that makes me enjoy it. It's rather grim, actually.

I had also been reading "The Dog from Hell". That story was neither interesting nor enjoyable for me, so I decided to discontinue it.

This New Year's Eve, I went to bed before midnight. I had been feeling down, possibly due to insufficient sleep. The prior night I had likewise gone to bed early, and it felt so good to get a good night's sleep that I wanted to repeat it. But it wasn't repeated. I heard fireworks, so I don't think I got any sleep until after midnight anyway. But still, that may have been the first New Year's Eve for which I didn't stay up.

13 days into my 16-day vacation, and I still haven't read a single page of the book I'm "reading". Perhaps it doesn't interest me much after all.

Instead, I've been shopping, cleaning, cooking, putting together gifts, decorating, sewing, visiting with people, as well as the other usual things. I don't feel like I've done anything particularly fun so far. (What would be fun to do?)
Gah.

Basic vegan cream cheese pie recipe, from old PETA magazine clippings I had:
2 8-oz containers of vegan cream cheese
1 cup sugar
juice of a whole lemon (or 4 Tbsp, depending on the recipe)
1 tsp vanilla
2 Tbsp cornstarch (one recipe includes this, another doesn't)
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Blend together ingredients until smooth. Pour into a graham pie crust. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 to 60 minutes or until top is golden brown.

Taking the dogs to (hopefully) get micro-chipped tomorrow. Serena has an appointment to get neutered in 2 weeks. On Friday I'm going to a funeral for one of Qiao's family friends.

It snowed, and I didn't even get excited about it this time. I mean, I was a little bit excited before it snowed, but then I realized that it would be easier all around if it didn't, and then it snowed, but I was busy shopping online and sewing, and didn't really care.

Umm.

I got nice xmas presents.

My dad and his wife almost visited me... they are driving cross-country to California, and forecasts of bad weather up north made them consider a southerly route which would have let them stop by my place. But then the blizzard started threatening the whole east coast, so they reconsidered and took a different route after all.

I bought a pair of fleece-lined jeans, and then decided that they would be much more comfortable with a shorter crotch. So I took off the waistband, cut off an inch or two all around, took in the sides a bit, and then sewed the waistband back on. I'm still sewing the belt loops back on.

Oh joy joy joy to the world. Hope you're having a good one.

Heat did not used to bother me. I had an extreme dislike of air-conditioning. (My experiences with AC were overwhelmingly of feeling imprisoned in a freezing building with stale recirculated air, feeling cold to the bone, while knowing that it was pleasantly warm outside.)
But something must have changed in my body / my head in recent years. Now when it gets over 86 degrees or so inside the house, I start getting a headache, and I have to turn on the AC to make the headache go away. I wonder why.

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I have the opportunity to customize my credit card with either one of many stock images, or with an image of my own (with various rules about what kind of images that are not allowed). At first, it seemed neat to be able to customize the card, and I certainly don't want the boring default image. But it's hard to decide what image I do want.

When I was a kid, I had posters of cats and kittens in my bedroom. When I got older, the idea of decorating my surroundings with images of animals whom I had never personally met, and who were possibly dead by now, seemed purposeless and disturbing. In my teens, I had some posters of movie characters on my walls... the posters served to remind me of the fantasy and excitement of the movies. But later on, the idea of having images of people on my walls began to seem pointless and disturbing.

Similarly now, the idea of putting an image of friends, family, or pets on my credit card seems disturbing to me. What if something were to happen to them, and/or they were to die? Then I'd be stuck with their image on the card, and I'd be reminded of them or of whatever had happened, every time I saw the card. It feels wrong.

For the credit card, I'm still debating whether to choose a stock image of the Statue of Liberty, or of palm-trees, or whether to find some image of my own.

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I resorted to putting out a borax-containing ant bait trap to kill the ants.
:-(

I had also tried vinegar, hot-sauce, and lemon oil air spray. As with the other things, the ants avoided those areas while they were wet, but crawled right over them once they were dry.

It even looked like they chewed a couple small holes through the areas I had caulked.

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I'm very nearly finished reading the thousand-page book "Atlas Shrugged". I started reading it about 16 months ago. There are just a few more pages left, which I plan to read this weekend.

In the last part of the book, one of the characters does a monologue which goes on for 56 whole pages! I had to skim some of that section; it got tedious.

While the book was interesting, I still feel that the underlying premise of the book and the mental state of its characters (except for the heroes/heroines), was not believable.

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Today's 3-D movies are pretty neat. I've seen 2 such movies, Alice in Wonderland and The Last Airbender. The 3-D effects are really good. Until seeing them, I hadn't realized the technology had advanced that much.

Do you have memories that you consider "good"? Memories of times when you felt great, or happy, or when the world seemed exciting and colorful? Memories of times when the future seemed to offer further fun and excitement? How many memories like that do you have? Does thinking of those memories make you feel good now too?

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Memories that at some point seemed good to me.

On Mallorca, walking and climbing out on the rocky lava-like outcropping towards the ocean. Hearing the ocean all around, roaring and rising and falling. With the sun shining and wind blowing. (Magic... stories... accompanying me in my mind) 2 distinct memories like that, different locations and trips, but otherwise similar. One time Forestfen was with me, the other time either Forestfen or my aunt was, I don't remember who... in both cases, they were distractions to me, pulling me away from the magical and back into the mundane. I preferred to be alone with my fantasies.

In the woods behind my apartment house in Munich, walking or running carelessly along the path, and being startled by my older brother and a group of his friends, who seemed to step out of nowhere, surrounding me in a narrowing circle. They must have been playing a game of stealth, hiding behind the trees and waiting to surprise me. It gave me a shivery/tingly feeling, as if I was being hunted/chased, as if I was a hero or on some quest, and an enemy wanted to capture me. It was creepy too; I pushed through the circle of boys and escaped. I'm not quite sure if this really happened, or if I dreamt it when I was a kid and kept the memory ever since.

The Empire Strikes Back. I *was* Luke. I had powers. Darth Vader was *evil* and wanted me to join him. There was magic and light and the depths of space.

The school trip to Egypt and Israel in the 7th grade. I kept mementos from that trip for so long, that I must have associated good/poignant memories with it. I had a mild crush on our tour-guide. He was Israeli, foreign, and had sparkling eyes. He was the leader, and I was one of the followers. He told us what to do. At one point during the trip, he noted my interest in the Hebrew alphabet and words, and he swiftly wrote a short phrase in Hebrew on a piece of paper for me. I treasured it; that was his only personal interaction with me but it felt special. Other memories from the trip were ambivalent; I remember being sad and possibly even crying while alone in a hotel room, while the other kids were socializing together. I remember one boy talking to me... I don't remember what he said, but it was something about me being sad or staying to myself and how I shouldn't do that... The mere fact that he talked to me seemed special and unusual, although I didn't know how to respond to what he said. Overall, it was a good trip. There was magic in the air; life was magic back then. Egyptian mythology and history, and ancient ruins were part of the magic.

Walking on a trail through deep woods near some mountain lake with ForestFen and Bro. I found a smooth gray stone that was vaguely shaped like an arrow-head, which became one of my treasures. Walking through forests, I was a ranger/"Indian"/(or whatever the word may be for that feeling of skillful knowledgeable self). I was in an alternate reality.

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Memories don't seem good or special anymore, because the feeling of magic is gone. I don't remember being happy; I can only think back and wonder if I felt happy in the past or not. But I do remember feeling magic, or at least being able to imagine a magical existence, and that made things seem exciting. Life had possibilities; the stories could come true for me some day; *I* would learn magic; I would be an apprentice to a wizard, or would somehow break through to an alternate reality were magic was real, and where someone like Darth Vader would interact with me.

Or maybe I was never happy with real life; maybe I escaped into fantasy. Books and fantasies were the real, exciting world. Maybe the only particularly good experiences I felt were ones where I was superimposing a fantasy onto the real world.

But the magic is gone. It is fiction. It does not seem real or believable anymore. Even if there were a Darth Vader wanting me to join the dark side, so what? And if I did, then what? Or if I didn't, then what? WHAT? Where is the magic? Where is the purpose, where is the reason for doing anything?

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I think the interactions with Wododu, and that one other dom, and Qiao early on, were good because I was fantasizing then too. But I was doing it with a *real* person, and they were *interacting* with me, and I started hoping that real life could actually possibly be amazing like a fantasy could, or even better! Except it wasn't real. It was just in my head. Thinking back on those experiences makes me awfully sad now, if I let it. Awfully sad from the disappointment, or not bothering to feel any emotion over it.

I bought 2 fiction books yesterday, to read. I bought 2 books last year too. It's a year later, and I haven't yet read more than a chapter or so of either of them. But maybe these new ones will capture my interest more. Perhaps. I've got about 100 pages left in the Atlas Shrugged book. Now that I'm working from home more often, I read even less than before, as I usually only read during my lunch break at work, and even then only sometimes. Maybe I'll start reading on the weekends, if a book captures my interest. Maybe. I used to enjoy reading. It ought to still be enjoyable, if I can find the right books.

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I feel like it isn't worth it to spend time researching who to vote for. I feel like I should just say to hell with it and not even vote. But I also feel it's a duty to do the research and to vote, even if I'm just guessing at who is the better candidate based on scant details, and even if the outcome makes no real difference to my life.

Trying to decide which candidate to vote for is slightly like being in a bookstore and trying to decide which book to buy, based on the cover, and what you see when skimming a few pages.

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I bought some half-price baby arugula. I'll cook it with the collard greens. I ought to still cook it today, before it goes bad, even though I've still got a big pot of squash stew in the fridge.

I'm now almost halfway thru the Atlas Shrugged book. I still like and dislike the same aspects about it as in the beginning.

I don't understand why, when people get upset about their partners having an affair, it is only or mainly over the aspect of the partner having sex with someone else. The partner can talk to someone else, correspond with them, spend time with them, do non-sexual things together with them, have fun with them, but it's only when there is something sexual involved, that it is considered a big deal or a major problem. Why is it considered such a big deal? If the partner falls in love with someone else, without having sex with them, why is it not considered as significant? Or is it not possible for most people to fall in love without having sex, or without desiring to have sex with the other person?

Parts of the book contrast what sex is like for Hank Reardon with his wife as compared to with his lover. His wife disdains sex, puts up with it as her "duty" to her husband, but tries to keep him from getting pleasure out of it. Whereas his lover enjoys sex, views it in a positive light, and makes it feel wonderful for him. The book describes how wrong the first way is, and how right the other way is. But I feel like I'm more similar to the wife, when it comes to sex, than the lover. I don't have a sex drive, and I don't particularly like sex... The vision of me being a lukewarm, disinterested, dispassionate body in bed doesn't strike me as too far from the truth... so, while I don't try to keep the other person from enjoying sex like the wife, I still feel that I resemble her more than the lover. So why would anyone sexual, especially someone who thinks so highly of that book, want to put up with me? Why does Q? Is it because he doesn't see me the way I see myself? Does he see his own image of me instead? Will that image slowly fade away over time? Does he think I've just repressed any sexual desires I may have as being a bad thing, like the wife did, as opposed to not having them? Does he think I will eventually become un-repressed?

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And why do some of my chigger bumps still itch, and why are some of them getting bigger again even though they were going away before? Does scratching them make them get big again?

I'm about a fifth of the way through "Atlas Shrugged", which may not sound like much, but it's a nearly thousand page book. The book is still keeping my interest, and I'm still enjoying it, but it's becoming clearer to me what I don't like about it.

One thing that bothers me is that the world is portrayed as having a small percentage of "good" people, with the remainder being "bad" people. The good people are intelligent, honorable, hard-working, and industrious. The rest of society is portrayed as an odd combination of dim-witted and cunning... dim-witted in that they don't seem to be able to think for themselves, or in that they say things and espouse ideas that don't make any logical sense, and cunning in that they are apparently trying to take advantage of the "good" people's labor and productivity, because they are either too stupid or lazy to do any useful work themselves. These "bad" people are portrayed as totally unlikeable. The way they are described - the adjectives used - make them seem completely ugly/lazy/cowardly/unpleasant.

That whole good versus bad quality of the story makes it seem too fictitious; like a children's cartoon. In some way, it reminds me of George Orwell's story, "Animal Farm".

Another thing that bothers me about the book, is the feeling that the whole story is trying to prove a point which I do not agree with, or only partially agree with. It's not just a feeling; the introduction to the book clearly states that Rand was putting forth her philosophy of something-or-other in the book's story. It seems to be a very pro-capitalism, anti-socialism philosophy. The "good" people are portrayed as industrious businesspeople, who can get anything done they set their mind too, and the only thing that causes them problems is the "bad" people getting in their way. Any mention of doing something for "the public good" is portrayed very negatively.

Another thing which strikes me about Rand's writing, is that she often uses 2 adjectives meaning nearly opposite things, next to each other. Sometimes they don't make any sense together, or it takes effort imagining what is meant by the combination. For example, "belligerent defensiveness". This isn't a bad thing in itself, it just seems curious to me, as if Rand was trying to combine the negative or positive overtones of two words to enhance the overall negative or positive aspect of something, without considering that the meaning of the words don't actually fit together. Most likely though, she did consider it, and did it on purpose.

The Book of Kells. It's amazing to think about how much time and labor went into writing, drawing, and coloring the pages of this book. Especially so, considering that there weren't printing presses back then, and that all that effort was expended, knowing that only a single one-of-a-kind book would result, which only a few people might ever see.

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"Dang. I have a good-looking body,"

I thought to myself... (at least from 10 feet away, in a mirror).

Yesterday, I was admiring the toned, tanned, muscular stomach of someone on a TV infomercial for some exercise gadget. (I also admired the shock of bleached-white hair on her head). But today I realized that my own torso looks just as good, if not even better.

I seem to finally have found another good-fitting sports-bra for daily use (ie. comfortable and not too tight on my ribcage, even when I bend forward). The size medium was still too tight, but the size large was comfortable. I also got a different one which is snugger but still comfortable, for exercising. I hope they are still comfortable after washing... it seems that at least half of the sports-bras I buy end up being too uncomfortable to wear. One thing I try to remember now when trying them on in the store, is to bend forward, as they may feel fine while I'm standing straight, but too tight in other positions.

It seems ironic to me, that with underwear, I have to buy the smallest size available in the women's section, and even then I still sometimes have to sew the leg-bands tighter to keep them from riding up. But with the sports-bras, I have to get size large, even though I have small breasts compared to most women. Surely my chest/ribcage isn't particularly large, either?

I was very happy with the last package of underwear I bought - Fruit of the Loom, size 5, low-rise briefs - as I did *not* need to sew the leg-bands tighter. (I've bought these same ones before, and had to sew them.) These fit me well right out of the package! (After being washed, anyway. I always wash new clothing before wearing it.) I figured the company must have determined that people wanted tighter legbands on this size.

So I bought another package of the exact same kind, from a different store... but the leg-bands on these look larger, which is disappointing. I haven't washed them yet, so perhaps they will still shrink. I'm hoping so! Otherwise, I've got 12 leg bands to sew, sigh... or maybe I could give them to the thrift store and try my luck buying another package from the first store.

I also bought a pair of men's white cargo pants, size 30x30 (the smallest size available). I'll need to wear a belt with them, but they look pretty and the fabric is nicely soft and supple. I haven't had a pair of white pants since... perhaps ever.

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Ah, what is it that makes me want to write posts about mundane things like clothes-shopping?

Oh, and while I'm at it, why do dress pants tend to have such weird closures? Why can't they just have a single button, like on other pants? Who wants to have to fumble around with *3* buttons, or a button and 2 hooks, or whatnot, everytime they use the bathroom?

Current Mood: chipper

I am reading "Atlas Shrugged", based on Qiao's recommendation. He gave me the book after having re-read it himself recently. I can't say yet whether I much like the book or not, but it's quite more interesting and readable than I thought it would be.

I came across the first sex-scene in the book today. The sex was described as being wonderfully pleasurable for both people. It was described as being how joy was meant to be expressed. Or something like that.

98% of the world's adult population, or somewhere there abouts, feels that way about sex. That sex is this wonderful, pleasurable thing. And I am left staring at the words, thinking, who are these people? They are not me. I do not feel the things they feel. They are alien to me. I am out of place in this world...

Every time I see sexual content on TV or in a movie, it makes me feel alienated and alone.

Even Ugly Betty was trying to make out with her boyfriend in the episode last week, and she was upset when he kept dodging her attempts. But then they hashed it all out, and up to his apartment they went, apparently to have wonderful, pleasurable sex.

Fuck you, world.

Music:

Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir
Amazon page - samples from St Hubert CD
last.fm page - videos

Immogen Heap
I was intrigued by the background music in this youtube vid.
Amazon page - samples from I Megaphone CD; I still like the Sweet Religion one best.

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Books:

These books featuring a hermaphrodite species sound interesting:
The Wraeththu books by Storm Constantine.
Google preview of first book in 2nd trilogy.

If you are born a male, people accept you as a boy and a man, and if you are born a female, people accept you as a girl and a woman. You may not be accepted by everyone as a "good example" or as an epitome of manhood or womanhood, nor as an attractive specimen of one, but generally, you are accepted as a man/woman simply based on your birth sex, regardless of your personality, appearance, and actions.

People perceive your gender based on their belief about your physical sex, which is mainly based on your physical appearance, but also on things such as your name and on what gender other people have ascribed to you. Perception and acceptance go hand in hand. If you are perceived to be male, you are accepted as a man, and if you are perceived to be female, you are accepted as a woman; at least, until those perceptions are brought into question. When someone is perceived as one sex, but then discovered to be another sex, people generally change their idea of that person from being a man or woman to vice-versa. This mental shift isn't something as simple as "Oh, I thought he had green eyes but they are actually blue"... it's a radical shift in perception of the person.

When a transsexual person has a sex-change, it is just a physical change; a change in appearance. Their personality remains basically the same. If they had been born their target sex instead of having had surgery and hormones to achieve it, they would have been accepted as that gender by general society. Yet, the fact that they had to change their body causes some people not to accept them as their stated gender. These people think there is something inherent in one's birth sex which makes one a man or woman, and that this cannot be changed even when the body is changed, or even when the person claims that their gender never matched their physical sex.

In this book I am reading, it sounds like the mother, when first coming to terms with her child being transsexual and having a sex-change operation, could not understand that her child was still the same person he had always been. To her, he had previously been a woman, and was now becoming a man, and to her, men and women are different, and so therefore he was becoming someone different than he had been before. This bothered her, because she felt she was losing the child she had known, when really the child was just going through a physical transformation.

People have subconscious preconceptions about what men are usually like and what women are usually like. Perhaps these preconceptions may change slightly over one's lifetime, influenced by the people one interacts with and the things one experiences. But once these subconscious preconceptions are formed in early childhood, they are the mental templates which the mind uses when thinking about actual people. The less well-known the actual person is, the more these templates are used to "fill in the missing picture" about that person in one's mind. As one interacts more with an actual person, that person may no longer fit cleanly within one's mental template for that gender, but that template still somehow affects how one thinks about the person.

Given two people, one who appears male and one who appears female, both with the exact some personality and mannerisms, I would still perceive them differently not just based on their appearance, but also on my mental gender templates. I am most definitely not immune to these kinds of preconceptions. And shifting the gender template I use for someone is not an easy task for me either. The more a transgendered person's physical appearance resembles their "target" sex/gender, the easier that mental shift is for me. This is why transgender people like being able to pass... it makes it easier for other people to perceive them as they perceive themselves.

Perhaps some of those gender preconceptions are valid... a man who is soft-spoken, kind and gentle probably would still have had a very different life than a woman who is soft-spoken, kind and gentle... but not necessarily.

It is hard to figure out what one's gender pre/conceptions are... they are like mental flavors, as I've written before. Not necessarily any kind of hard and fast beliefs about what a man must be like, or what a woman must be like, but... flavors... fuzzy fill-in-the-blank-nesses, and if there are no blanks, then surround-perception-of-person-with-this-flavor-ness.

And what is the correlation between perceived gender and sexual attraction? Why is it that I can feel sexual attraction to some people whom I perceive to be a "man" or a "non-woman", whereas I feel like I couldn't feel sexual attraction to a "woman"? Is my mental template for "woman" only composed of things I am not sexually attracted to?

I was able to get my flogger vid to upload, after converting its format:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq_74aEpAik

Also recorded a couple short vids this evening of just of me talking, not that I have much of anything to say, but I wanted to upload something other than me dancing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJAifh3LfdU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mAOcNhWAn0

I have started reading a book, "What Becomes You", written by a friend of someone on my LJ friends list. So far, I have been relating with much of the author's description of their childhood. When I was a kid, I didn't really expect to grow up to be a woman... I don't remember what I expected, but...

Well actually I do remember one imagination I had when I was a kid, it was of me trying to order food at a fast food restaurant for a bunch of kids (mine, I suppose) including at least one set of identical twins, and trying to make sure that each kid was given a choice as to what they wanted to get (and how complicated that was)... although part of this imagination, perhaps the more significant part, was of me being one of those blond-haired twins.

So, if I partially imagined myself as the mother (?) of those kids, does that mean I imagined myself as a woman? I don't remember. Maybe I imagined I had adopted them. Or maybe I wasn't ever the adult in this imagination, maybe I was always one of the kids... memory is so subjective and uncertain, sigh.

Then, there was another imagination, of me as an adult in a house. It was next to a cornfield. I was a farmer, and grew corn. And there was another imagination, of me being a postman... postal carrier.. delivering mail. These imaginations were part of trying to figure out what job I might possibly want to do when I grew up, since adults had to have jobs.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment to

dame_grise's blog (your tagees will post to mine, etc.) once you've posted your three sentences.
(The last step is the twist, because you don't post to my journal).

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Well, the closest book is my digital camera manual. Page 123 has some instructions in French.

Next closest "book" is a thick Computer Shopper magazine. Page 123 is an ad for a computer.

Next closest book is "Engineer-In-Training Reference Manual", but its pages are numbered chapter-dash-page, so there isn't a page 123.

This kind of meme never works well for me, because the interesting books are never close by. Oh well.

I had a book of poetry closer by last week, but then I moved it. It's got a poem on page 123, but the poem isn't punctuated. I was considering posting part of it, but now I feel uncomfortable with that idea because the person who wrote it is someone on my LJ friends-list, and it's their copyrighted material. So, umm, well. Like I said, this kind of meme never works well for me.

I tag:

sweetprince

andrewducker

alcippe

daddysambiguity

kellineil

I'm an androgyne. I have my very own well AND a cave!

Current Mood: amused

Someone at a neighboring house started blasting music this morning around 2:45am, awakening me and keeping me from falling back asleep for at least half an hour. But the thing is, I really liked the music. It was in Spanish, and dancy, and neat-sounding. I might buy it for myself if I knew what artist/CD it was. So I lay there in bed, slightly annoyed but also choosing to simply take pleasure in it.

This morning I heard that there had been a lunar eclipse, and wondered if perhaps my neighbors had been having a lunar-eclipse-party?! Perhaps they were celebrating while the earth's shadow crossed the moon's disk? So I looked up the time of the eclipse, but they were a couple of hours too early for that.

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I wonder how much of my gender identity has been influenced by the book-reading I did as a kid. Many of the books I read had male protagonists. Yet many of those books' authors were female. Therefore, perhaps the male characters whose personalities I identified with, weren't exactly masculine in a real-life sense, as they were written from an arguably feminine perspective. And perhaps that gave me somewhat of a not-quite-feminine, not-quite-masculine gender identity myself?

I've decided that the label "submissive" really doesn't fit me well. Rather, I'm a bottom with some submissive tendencies who enjoys psychological D/s play. Not as easy to say, but... better descriptive.

I don't want D/s to be the basis or crux of a relationship. I want friendship, partnership, companionship, and affection to be the basis. But I like D/s as play, as something fun, something which affects me strongly and makes me feel good. I believe I even need it, to enjoy a relationship. When I say "play", I don't mean it can't be serious, and significant, and even painful at times. But I don't see myself as being constantly submissive. As part of the play, I might even want to act rebellious sometimes. But sometimes, I might not want to play at all.

I don't want someone who will treat me like a sub all the time, but I do want someone who might treat me like a sub at any time.

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I want to be loved for who I am.

When I close my eyes at night, I want to feel sheltered by someone's concern and affection for me.

When I wake, I want to feel that the care & concern & affection is real and tangible, not just something I pretended/invented in order to fall comfortably asleep.

I want to love someone for who they are, not just for the affection they show me.

I want someone who can inspire that wonderfully euphoric feeling in me that has something to do with D/s.

I want someone with whom I can feel comforted by their physical touch and presence at least as often as I resort to comforting myself by thinking about it when I am alone.

In other words, I want to spend more time with my partner, than I spend yearning to be with them. But I guess there would need to be some times of yearning, in order for me to recognize how much they mean to me.

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I was trying to think of the word to describe a particular relationship, like between my master/soulmate and me in one of my fantasies. The kind of relationship where the one has power over the other... in the fantasy, it was absolute power - life & death; power to read my thoughts and emotions; etc. In real life, I guess it could be a lesser power... But where, like in the fantasy, the other person can look at me (straight through me) in a way that makes my insides drop... makes me lose balance, feeling that power of theirs over me. A wonderful feeling of belonging, of fear, of excitement, of acknowledging their power over me.

I can't think of the word for describing that particular kind of relationship.
Disciple, no. Minion, no. Dominant/submissive, not necessarily. Master/slave, no.
Master/something... maybe. Master/pupil, not necessarily.

When I was young, I used to envision master/apprentice relationships as that kind of relationship. I had read books about apprentices where the master even had the power to have the apprentice put to death, if they were displeased enough with them. And then there was Star Wars, where Darth Vader was the Emperor's apprentice... oh, that was so cool.
But nowadays, the term apprentice just means to me someone who is being taught things. It doesn't so much imply the master having power over the student.

And for the relationship I'm trying to think of the word for, the "master" wouldn't necessarily even have to be teaching the other person anything. It wouldn't even need to be a consensual power-exchange relationship, just one where the one person has some kind of significant power over the other. Such as a captor and captive. It seems like there should be some word for that. Maybe it will come to me.

well.
on the downside, just found out mybravenet.com hosting has been terminated, and so my old site is gone. guess i'll put it on the same server as my new site then.

hope i can get google to re-index my cursewords page. hey, it must have a pretty good ranking. search on "curse words", and it's on the first page of results. heh. doesn't look like my duel of the fates page is even indexed anymore though. maybe because i didn't update it in such a long time, or because the song is old now and people don't search for it much anymore.

on the upside, i've been friended. and thru a link of theirs, i rediscovered an alexander key fanpage which i had lost track of a while back, since my link to it had become obsolete. cool.

oh, and someone gave me the gift of a yahoo-group. made me moderator. hee! i'm a moderator! i've got the Power! but it's not really a real group. more of a ploy. but i suppose it could become a real group. perhaps.

Current Mood: not even terribly upset
Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/481245.html

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Darkoshi

Darkoshi's Enchantment

May 2025

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